Genoa, and to all the Italian princes who had any authority in the case, to put a stop to the publication of a work which had been circulated without his sanction, but in vain.  Even the first complete edition, which was issued in 1581, seems to have been without his consent; for the author complains that he was compelled, by the surreptitious publication of parts of his poem, to finish the work in haste, and he wished for more time to elaborate the plot and polish the style.  In the later editions, no less than seven of which appeared the same year, Tasso seems to have been to some extent consulted; but it may be said that the great epic was given to the world in the form in which we now have it, without the author’s imprimatur, and without the benefit of his finishing touches.  But in spite of this disadvantage it took the whole country at once by storm.  Two thousand copies were sold in two days.  Throughout literary circles nothing else was spoken of.  The exquisite stanzas, full of the true chivalric spirit, touched a responsive chord in every Italian bosom.  Not only in the academies of the learned was the poem discussed, not only was it recited before princes amid the splendours of courts, but priests mused over it in the solitude of the cloister, and peasants chanted its sonorous strains as they worked in the fields.  Quotations from it, we are told, might be heard from the gondolier on the Grand Canal of Venice, as he greeted his neighbour in passing by, and from the brigand on the far heights of the Abruzzi, as he lay in wait for the unsuspecting traveller; and “a portion of the Crusader’s Litany was a favourite chant of the galley-slaves of Leghorn, as, chained together, they dragged their weary steps along the shore.”

There is no book which it is easier to find fault with than the Gerusalemme when estimated by the satiated critical spirit of modern times, which insists upon brevity, and demands in each line a certain poetic excellence; especially if the poem is known only through the medium of a translation, which, however faithful, is but the turning of the wrong side of a piece of tapestry.  We may object to the want of originality in the leading characters, to the occasional inflated style, and the conceits and plays upon words now and then introduced, to the apparently disproportionate influence of love upon the action of the poem, as Hallam has remarked, giving it an effeminate tone, and, above all, to the introduction of so much supernatural machinery in the form of magic and demons; for such supernaturalism is out of keeping altogether with our vaster knowledge of the universe, and our more solemn ideas of Him who pervades it.  But it is not by an analysis of particular parts, or a criticism of special peculiarities, that the Gerusalemme should be judged.  It is by its effect as a whole, as a highly finished work of art.  A single campaign of the first crusade—­that of 1099—­embraces the whole action of the poem; but the numerous episodes